The US said yesterday it was troubled by new disclosures indicating Iran conducted experiments to create plutonium as late as 1998, five years after it claimed it had abandoned such work. But it said the discoveries would not alter its full support for European efforts to negotiate an end to Iranian efforts to produce nuclear materials.
The disclosures about the small-scale plutonium reprocessing experiments conducted in 1995 and 1998 were contained in a report by Pierre Goldschmidt, deputy director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, delivered to the agency's board in Vienna yesterday.
The agency concluded from plutonium samples brought back from Iran in 2003 that the country had conducted these later experiments and Iran admitted to them in a letter to the agency last month.
Mr Goldschmidt's report also said he was seeking shipping documentation to resolve discrepancies in Iranian statements about when components for enriching uranium arrived in the country in the 1990s. There are signs some parts arrived earlier than Tehran had previously indicated.
He also sought more information about the initial contacts by Iranian officials with Abdul-Qadeer Khan, a Pakistani scientist whose network provided substantial help to Iran's efforts to enrich uranium. So far Iran has produced only a single page report of a supposed first meeting in 1987.
The US, which accuses Iran of pursuing a clandestine programme to produce nuclear weapons, said that Iran's misreporting about its nuclear programme was too pervasive to be inadvertent. Iran, which asserts its nuclear ambitions are peaceful, denied that the misreporting was significant.
"These continuing contradictions between Iran's declarations and the facts as they are uncovered cannot be explained by inadvertent error. They are simply too numerous and pervasive," Jackie Sanders, US ambassador to the IAEA, told the board. "It is evident that Iran has not come clean about its past or present nuclear activities."
The US called for the complete dismantling of Iran's "fuel cycle" - under which Iran would be able to manufacture its own nuclear materials - including all its uranium enrichment activities together with a heavy water research reactor under construction. As part of their talks to end Iran's nuclear production plans, France, Britain and Germany have offered to build in its place a light water reactor - which is more proliferation-proof than its heavy water equivalent.
But US officials in Vienna said the disclosures, while "greatly troubling", reinforced the need for negotiations with the three EU states. "This only underscores the need for a successful negotiation between the EU3 and Iran," said one.
In a separate development, Reuters reported that the IAEA board unanimously approved Saudi Arabia's request to sign an agreement that curtails the agency's ability to uncover any secret atomic activity. The Saudis signed the "small quantities protocol", where member states declare they have little or no nuclear material and therefore do not need full inspections.
The US, EU and Australia had urged the Saudis to withdraw their request to sign the agreement but Riyadh refused.
